Naslov
Description of nature as an act of anticipation: Australia in Rosa Campbell Praed's "My Australian Girlhood"

Autori
Klepač, Tihana

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Skup
12th Biennial Conference GAST Conference

Mjesto i datum
Klagenfurt, Austrija, 30.09.2010. - 02.10.2010

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
Australia; 19th century women's writing; autobiography; Pread; My Australian Girlhood

Sažetak
Writing My Australian Girlhood from the position of her “civilised existence” in 1902 London Rosa Campbell Praed remembers her “wild youth ‘down under.’” In line with the dominant discourses of the period Praed begins her narrative describing Australia as a “young-old land” calling attention to its youth, even childhood, while also dwelling on its hoariness, and the “convulsions that have torn” it into existence. Additionally, she associates Australia with nature which stands in sharp opposition to culture, to “the smug English conventionalities.” Characteristically for a colonial period in which “home” is still a shifting signifier, Praed’s images of nature progress from “the grim spell of the bush, ” which overwhelms the traveller into the impenetrable “primeval forests” of Australia, via the slopes of the lush rose garden with vines along its fences, to the brown, scorched grass, and dry creeks under the “steaming grey blanket” of intense summer heat, and the “flaming scorpions of fires” racing down the mountains, thus providing emotional sustenance required to create a home in an unknown land, or in Praed’s case, of experiencing passionate “nostalgia for the gum-trees” in her later years. As such Praed’s text is a “protest against the direct actions of [her] masculine counterparts” who were involved in the process of taming of the wilderness identifying the clearing of the land as a preparation for its “true possession” once it is “remade in a more familiar image” (Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi).

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA